A 2018 piece for Stanford Live on Bowie's death and the art of the eulogy.
The night that the news went out that David Bowie had died, I was just finishing a book in which he was the central figure. On January 10th 2016, I was literally on the last pages of my glam rock history Shock and Awe when Twitter told me that this towering pop figure had fallen.
A mixture of emotions muddied my mind. Having labored for
three years on the book, I felt like I had an unusual intimacy with Bowie, as
if I truly understood his motivations – specifically that ache of emptiness
that drove him in search of a succession of cutting edges, a desperate hunger
for new ideas to kindle the creative spark within him. At the same time, having
reached the end of my book, I felt oddly detached, as if I had finished with
Bowie, or even – in some superstitious way -
finished him off.
Born in Great Britain, but a resident of America since 1995, for
me Bowie’s passing was further entangled with growing feelings of nostalgia: he’d
loomed over the Seventies, my childhood, just like the Beatles had dominated
the Sixties. Bowie’s songs were a perpetual presence on U.K. radio; his face
appeared regularly on TV, especially on the weekly pop show Top of the Pops. From the entrancing strangeness of “Space
Oddity”, through the homoerotic intimations of “John, I’m Only Dancing”, to the
cross-dressing subversions of the promo video for “Boys Keep Swinging”, Bowie had
not only always been there, he’d always been startling. For many people
across the world, but particularly for those who grew up in the U.K. during
that era, Bowie’s sudden non-existence felt like a part of the sky had suddenly
vanished.
More ignoble thoughts intruded amid the grief. I did think,
selfishly, “damn, there’s going to be a
flood of Bowie-related books rush-written, to compete with my own tome, over
which I’ve toiled so diligently and protractedly.” There was annoyance too, as it became clear
that despite my exhaustion I would have to resume work immediately and write an
extra closing essay to round off the book.
Ending Shock and Awe
with Bowie peeved me because one intention starting out had been to put the man
in his place just a little: I aimed to contextualise Bowie, reconstruct the
culture and the rock music discourse out of which he’d emerged, while also
elevating other artists now semi-forgotten but who at the time were considered
his contemporaries and artistic equals (as well as often selling many more
records than him, in fact). I hadn’t wanted
my history to become his story - but
here was Bowie upstaging everyone again, insisting on being the last word, or
at least the last subject for my words, in the Book of Glam.
Talking about upstaging - Bowie’s death coincided with the
Golden Globes, which meant that he knocked all the winners off the front page
worldwide, outshone the world’s stars with his own supernova. Including Lady
Gaga – the figure who’d done her darnedest to be the Bowie of the 21st
Century, and that night had won a trophy
for her turn in American Horror Story.
As I returned reluctantly to my computer, I pondered how to
approach the daunting task of summing up a man’s life and work. All around,
online and in print, teemed thousands of public tributes and private
testimonials – a fiesta of remembrance, in which professional writers and fans alike competed
to find fresh perspectives and idiosyncratic angles. Especially because my
essay would have a longer shelf life, it felt like I should attempt to speak
not just for my own feelings but for the larger community of people who had
been affected by Bowie’s existence. There were many notes being sounded in
those weeks immediately after his death, but a prominent leitmotif was
gratitude, tinged with self-congratulation. A sentiment crystallized sharpest
in the widely circulated statement, mistakenly attributed to the actor Simon
Pegg: “if
you’re sad today, just remember the Earth is over four billion years old and
you somehow managed to exist at the same time as David Bowie.” As is so often the case with the passing of a
pop-culture icon – think of Prince - it felt like people were mourning
themselves by proxy, coming to terms with the fading of their own time, and
holding fast to the consoling belief that they lived through an exceptional
era.
I decided to approach the essay as a eulogy, written on
behalf of the gathered grieving, yet I would also try for something almost
impossible: a honest eulogy. In other words, I would aim to be true to the
insights about his character,
motivations, influence and legacy that had emerged through writing the
book (a verdict more ambivalent than you
might expect) while still transmitting a sense of awe that someone so strange
and ambitious could have moved within the humble domain of pop music. A sense of how improbable it all was, really
- and how unlikely to happen again,
despite the wishful efforts of figures like Gaga, or Kanye West, or Janelle
Monae, to achieve something equivalent in terms of art-into-pop impact.
The root meaning of the word eulogy in Ancient Greek is
“speak well.” The funeral oration is meant to be a song of praise, and that
means it almost inevitably becomes a whitewash, a lick of paint covering over
the cracks and fault-lines. The death of someone is not the best time for
airing the whole truth about that someone. Instead, just like the
cosmetically-enhanced face of the dearly departed at an open-casket funeral,
you are trying to fix the final and lasting image of that person as seen in
their very best light. The mortician and the eulogist are in the same business
really.
Amid the collective outpouring of grief and gratitude for
Bowie’s sonic and style innovations, his personae shifts and image games and
the sheer drama of a career played out on the stage of the mass media, there
was understandably scant inclination for a close examination of less wholesome or
impressive sides of his work. Like that alarming phase in the mid-Seventies during
which Bowie talked in fascist terms of the need for a strong leader and called
for an anti-permissive crackdown on liberal decadence. Or all those credulous
and indiscriminate flirtations with magic and mysticism that ran through much
of his life (again reaching an unsightly climax in the cocaine-crazed years
circa 1974-76). People likewise didn’t
dwell much on the long period during which Bowie’s Midas touch failed him: the
years of the “Blue Jean” mini-film, the Glass Spider tour, Labyrinth, Tin Machine and the beard… A period that if you were being honestly
harsh constituted (give or take the occasional quite cool single) an unbroken
desert of inspiration and direction that lasted two whole decades: 1983 to
2013, from the last bars of Let’s Dance
to the first of The Next Day. I
distinctively remember that through much of that time, Bowie dropped away not
just as figure who frequented the pop charts or commanded attention, but even
as a reference point, something that new bands would cite as a model or touchstone.
It makes sense that the least compelling phases or most
questionable aspects of Bowie’s life wouldn’t figure in the immediate post-mortem
reckoning. Speaking ill of the recently dead is not a good look. But something
of Bowie’s complexity – his flaws and his follies– got written out with the
concentrated focus on his genius achievements, personal charm, and acts of
generosity.
Maybe it’s my age, but I’m sure I can’t be alone in feeling
that important pop cultural figures are dying off at an accelerated rate. Then
again, perhaps this is an illusion created by the sheer overload of coverage
triggered by each passing: the internet and social media create so much
opportunity and space for remembrance, and the profusion of outlets fuels a
competition to offer ever more forensically deep or differently angled takes on
the departed artist. There seems to be a widespread compulsion felt by
civilians as well as professional pundits to make an immediate public
statement: the news goes out that an icon has gone and Facebook teems with oddly
official-sounding bits of writing that often read like obituaries with a slight
first-person twist.
Sometimes I’ve felt that people protest a little too much
about their intense relationship with the extinguished star. Where did all
these people come from with their lifelong and surprisingly deep acquaintance
with the oeuvre of Tom Petty? Who knew
there were people who bothered with the three George Michael albums after 1990’s
Listen With Prejudice Vol.1? And surely I’m not the only one out there who –
while fully cognizant and wholly respectful of the world-historical eminence of
Aretha Franklin – only ever owned her Greatest
Hits and – if I’m honest – really only ever craves to hear “I Say A Little Prayer”?
The truth of pop for most people, I suspect, is that we use
the music to soundtrack our lives, but in a fairly fickle, personal-pleasure
attuned way, and – apart from a few formative exceptions, the kind of teen
infatuations that shape worldviews – we seldom engage with the totality of an
artist’s work and life. Tom Petty, for me, boils down rather brutally to the
urge to turn up the volume when “Free Falling” and “Don’t Come Around Here No
More” come on the radio (in other words, he’s on the same level as The Steve
Miller Band and Bachman-Turner Overdrive). Unfair or not, George Michael
reduces to a couple of nifty Wham! singles plus “Faith” and “Freedom! ‘90”. A
few moments of unreflective pleasure in the lives of millions of casual
listeners is no small achievement, although it wouldn’t have been enough for
these guys, who craved to be Serious Artists on the level of those they
venerated: Dylan and the Byrds, for Petty… someone like Stevie Wonder or Prince, for
Michael. No amount of earnest reassessment or auteurist reappraisal could
persuade me to dig deep into their discographies for those lost gems tucked
away on Side 2 of a late-phase album.
You’ll get no argument from me about Bowie, of course:
career doldrums and dodgy opinions aside, he’s as major an artist as rock has
produced, worthy of taking as seriously as anybody (which is why the fascist
flirtations and the half-baked occultism are troubling, as opposed to something
you’d laugh off in a lesser figure). And Bowie also did what almost no fatally
ill or otherwise declining pop star has ever managed, which is to go out on an
artistic high. Beyond their musical daring and desperate expressive intensity, Blackstar and the videos for “Lazarus”
and the title track made for a fitting last statement because of the sheer care
that went into them. This was so utterly characteristic of Bowie and the way he
went about things. Who among us - facing the final curtain, sick in body and frail
of spirit – could have summoned the
obsessive energy and psychic strength to meticulously craft their
artistic farewell to the world? Who,
confronting oblivion, would have been so concerned about how they looked and
sounded at the end? Only Bowie.
As I found writing Shock and Awe, the beginning of Bowie’s public life was faltering, a series of false starts and fumbled career moves. It took Bowie eight years of dithering and stylistic switches to really become a star. In contrast, the closing of his career was immaculately executed. What some sceptics always regarded as his core flaws – cold calculation, excessive control – triumphed at the end. Bowie organized a grand exit so elegant that it fixed forever our final image of him, rendering all eulogies superfluous.
